Practical S4HANA Output management – Part 1

I was all excited to learn that SAP has been revamping the age old output management. The conventional output management is all we knew in the past years that needed to be setup differently for different documents. While the idea of all the outputs converging into one place excited me, it was a roller coaster ride throughout the process. In this blog series I would like to share our experience and what it took to practically implement the new output management.

Conceptual differences:

I will use the ECC output management for Sales and purchasing to support the comparison. Condition technique is used differently in both the approaches. Here are some of the salient points that I have observed in both the approaches

NAST Output management

S4HANA output management

Leverages condition tables and communication structures

Leverages BRF+ rules

Ability to create a number of custom condition tables and access sequences

Supports building conditions using BRF+ using the fields supported by the application object

Flexibility to add ABAP code in output requirements for more fine-tuned control

The application object is supported by one CDS view

Ability to extend communication structures and literally populate any value in the communication structure using the user exits.

Archive link is optional. But not very integrated with output management. You cannot view old outputs from archive link from output screen

Supports multiple channels Print, Email, XML, IDOC. Documentation and SAP notes say Fax is not supported but can be made to work

Works for all of Sales and purchasing documents

Does not support special functions explicitly but the same can be accomplished by adding code to any print program/channel

Configuration and approach is different for finance, WM, Production

Supports multi tenancy and works with cloud solutions

Archive link is standard

Retains a copy of original output, very helpful to keep track of different versions sent to the customer

SAP’s direction seems to be converging all the outputs into BRF+ approach. Underlying technology for BRF+ lends itself to be used with any document

Much cleaner email templates that can leverage a lot of context sensitive data that can be leveraged

Is S4HANA output management ready for the prime time?

In my personal opinion the new output management has still a long way to go to realize it’s true potential. However I have found that it has adequate features that are working that can be leveraged on the limited set of documents that it currently supports. Since SAP’s future strategy seems to be in the new output management direction, I think we will be doing better service to our clients by directing them towards the new output management.

In the next blog, I will explain step by step instructions on how to setup a new print output